


No One Here Gets Out Alive

by forthegreatergood



Series: Robot Doubles for Everybody [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blow Jobs, Canon-Typical Violence, Getting Together, Hand Jobs, Life Model Decoys, M/M, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Power Imbalance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 14:13:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15293280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: After the sky opened up and an alien army fell out, everyone's definitions of 'unreasonable' couldn't help but shift.  Phil never thought he'd be walking around with extraterrestrial DNA holding him together.  Clint never thought he'd wind up a robot.  Neither of them thought it would be this hard to work together.How they’d settled onClint--how they’d decided that the real, flesh and blood version of him being sidelined until psych decided to stamp his jacket ‘cleared for duty’ somehow warranted a robot version being fired up to replace him in the field--was still a complete mystery.Clint wanted to assume Phil could clear it up for him, but he strongly suspected Hill had proposed it and Phil had just looked her dead in the eye and said “Rock and roll.” instead of thinking it through.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Marvel.
> 
> Not beta-read. Please post any noticed errors in the comments, and they'll get fixed.

Clint scanned the base, resignation settling in. Too many soldiers, too much cargo, reinforcements too far away. It might have been different if May had been there, and in an active role. It might have been different, if Ward wasn’t parked in the medical pod back on the Bus. As it was, there was no way to take them on without it being a suicide run. At his side, Phil stirred, tensing in a way that made Clint instinctively grab the back of his vest and hold on. Phil turned his head and gave Clint a blistering look.

“What do you think you’re doing, Barton?” he grunted.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Clint shot back.

“If we don’t do something, that plane’s taking off with a half-ton payload of alien tech bound for an international arms dealer,” Phil snapped. Clint didn’t relax his grip. Phil glared at him, and Clint wondered whether Phil was debating trying to shake Clint off, which wouldn’t work, or trying to slither out of the vest, which was a terrible idea.

“Yeah, I get that. Did you miss the part where there’s twenty of them, two of us, and no cover from here to the tarmac? And that, from the sound of those engines, take-off’s in under five minutes? So unless you’ve got a really dynamite plan--”

“Barton.” Phil’s voice dropped, and Clint swallowed. “ _Let go of me._ ” 

Clint glared back and grudgingly eased his grip. Phil and that fucking I’m-in-charge voice. He wondered if Phil would bust it out as quickly if he knew how far it got under Clint’s skin, if he knew Clint imagined it rumbling in his ear when he jacked off. Phil pulled away and straightened his vest, then reached into the gear bag between them. Clint watched, stunned, as Phil whipped out a grenade launcher and sent a pair of grenades whistling toward the hangar the soldiers were emptying.

“Did you even bother aiming?” Clint hissed.

“It’s a distraction,” Phil said, as if that was a perfectly reasonable answer instead of a completely batshit one. “As you just finished pointing out, there’s no cover.”

And then Phil was darting out of the tree line, keeping his profile low at least, and Clint was following him and swearing. Next time Phil used that voice, Clint resolved, he was either going to sit on him or kiss him. It wasn’t like Phil could write him up for disobeying orders when the order in question was tantamount to cheering him on while he got himself killed. Clint had the laws of robotics on his side, after all, and Phil would be reporting the whole thing directly to Fury, who Clint didn’t see looking kindly on Phil checking his brain at the door. Especially since he never pulled this shit when they had the kids in tow, so Clint was sure that Phil was, in fact, aware that he was making bad calls.

Fortunately, everyone on the base seemed to assume that this was a normal bust instead of two incredibly overconfident idiots, and their priority appeared to be cutting their losses and avoiding arrest. A handful of men already at the hatch laid down cover fire while the rest hustled up the ramp with what they had in their hands and helped tie down the cargo already on the plane. The engines were revving hard by the time Phil hit the tarmac, and Clint watched in horror as the soldier closest to them raised his gun, drawing a clear bead on Phil. There were too many obstructions between Clint and the soldier for him to get a good shot--dropping the guy with a single bullet wasn’t going to happen. He settled for a spray-and-pray maneuver, hoping to make it worth the man’s time to follow everyone else up the ramp, and tackled Phil to the ground.

Clint wrapped an arm around Phil’s torso and dragged him behind a crate of hopefully inert or at least non-flammable gods-knew-what, and the plane began taxiing down the runway away from them. Phil rolled to his knees, rifle up and ready, and Clint pulled him down again.

“If they come back around for a strafing run, we’re toast, and then they actually get away,” Clint said, before Phil could protest. “If you want to wait like five fucking seconds, I can tag an engine while you call in their trajectory, and we can wrap this up instead of limping back to the Bus so Ward can armchair quarterback us.”

Phil had to stop and think about it, which made Clint want to scream, but it wasn’t a no, and it lasted until the plane was far enough away that the pilot would think twice about circling back over maintaining course and getting out of range. Clint rested his rifle on the crate, got his target in his sites, and squeezed off a shot that made the starboard engine sputter and begin pouring smoke. Phil was on the comms relaying coordinates and a description of the aircraft, its occupants, and its payload by the time Clint had lined up a second shot, which hit but didn’t knock anything out of commission.

Clint pulled himself up and did a quick visual sweep of the base. He missed the adrenaline high that followed things like this, but he didn’t miss the inevitable come-down, the way it made people sloppy and careless. Phil joined him after a moment, still obviously keyed up and ready to go, like he’d somehow only gotten half the fight he’d signed up for when he’d lobbed a pair of explosives at a fortified position and then stormed it half-blind. Clint followed him into the hangar, pausing at its mouth to make sure the grenades hadn’t started a chemical fire or compromised anything structurally necessary. He had no intention of surviving the last ten minutes only to get crushed by a collapsing ceiling. Phil apparently had no such concerns.

“Damn it, Coulson,” he muttered, jogging after his CO. “You want to tell me what’s so important that we couldn’t just call in an APB on the plane?”

“You know what they’re carrying,” Phil said flatly, digging his flashlight out of a pocket. “That much offensive tech and high-yield weapons batteries on the open market? It’d be a bloodbath.”

“Yes, I get that,” Clint said, trying to keep his tone even. Phil wasn’t going to respond to Clint yelling at him any better than he’d responded to anything else in the past few months. Clint would have said he was on edge, but that implied that Phil ever took a few minutes to back away from it. It was like he’d pitched a tent on it and was just living there now. It was one thing to play one-man army when you had a circulatory system full of super-soldier serum, but even Captain America had always worked with the Howling Commandos for backup. “What I’m still a little fuzzy on is why you felt the need to play cowboy.”

It was difficult, confining the question to just that. Phil had always been more willing to take chances than a lot of SHIELD’s strike team handlers, but that had been contingent on the rewards justifying the risks. Phil had backed him when he’d brought Nat in from the cold, and Phil had supported Fury on the plan to assemble a superpowered strike team, and Phil had tried to talk Fury into sending him after the Ten Rings when Stark had been kidnapped, because all of it had been worth the admittedly high odds of things going pear-shaped. 

Clint wasn’t sure where the payoff was in letting a pair of barely-pubescent probably-evil geniuses turn their new attack drones loose on the Bus while it was in flight, or in hiring a felonious hacker with a terrible attitude that they’d literally found living out of a panel van, or in leading with their chins when the smart money was on sitting back and calling in an air-strike. It was like risk had simply stopped registering, for Phil.

Of course, actually calling him on it was liable to lead right back to the unbelievable, completely fucking ridiculous risk that was loading a SHIELD operative’s personality into a customized doombot and sending it on off-off-off-books missions with Fury’s right hand and a bunch of teenagers in a bleeding edge quinjet. Hill had walked him through the process, when they’d booted him up. The intensely uncomfortable brainscan they’d tranqed him up for last week--for him; over a year ago for them--had created a digital print--somehow, by methods he’d need at least one PhD in neurology to understand--of his entire mind, memories and personality and skills included. They’d then loaded that into one of Victor von fucking Doom’s stolen doubles retooled to look like Clint instead, because why not?

That had been the part Hill had more or less skipped, as if it was self-explanatory. He knew he wasn’t the only one who’d been scanned. Phil had insisted on the sedative for him because Phil had done it without one and needed a week to recover. They’d discovered a subject had to be conscious for it by trying to scan Captain America while he’d still been partially frozen. They still couldn’t replicate Doom’s tech in terms of realism and resilience, so unless they had a whole goddamned warehouse full of boosted doombots, SHIELD had somehow decided that Clint was the best guy to take the Ferrari for a test drive instead of, say, one of the hundreds of agents who’d been killed during Loki’s invasion. 

There had to have been at least one agent on the KIA list with a usable brainscan on file, one agent who’d happily swap their future as a human being for a chance to say goodbye to their family and pet their dog one last time and write an open letter to the assholes in their homeowner’s association. How they’d settled on _him_ \--how they’d decided that the real, flesh and blood version of him being sidelined until psych decided to stamp his jacket ‘cleared for duty’ somehow warranted a robot version being fired up to replace him in the field--was still a complete mystery. 

Clint wanted to assume Phil could clear it up for him, but he strongly suspected Hill had proposed it and Phil had just looked her dead in the eye and said “Rock and roll.” instead of thinking it through. Presumably, there was something in Phil’s jacket to explain the change, some incident in the missing year-plus of Clint’s life that accounted for it, some experimental surgery that had cauterized Phil’s ability to give a fuck or prevented him from ever chilling out. Equally presumably, Clint didn’t have clearance to read it.

“This is the job, Barton,” Phil said, the beam of his flashlight sweeping over the wreckage in the rear of the hangar. “Playing cowboy is what this team was designed to do. You knew that when you came aboard.”

“Okay, let me rephrase the question,” Clint said. “I’m a little fuzzy on why you felt the need to take an incredibly stupid risk that jeopardized the whole mission. I don’t remember you being this trigger-happy.”

“I don’t remember you being this insubordinate,” Phil said, nettled.

“You want me to stop being insubordinate, stop giving commands that add up to watching you get shot at when there’s a safer play to make,” Clint retorted. He couldn’t keep the heat out of his voice, and he regretted not just keeping his mouth shut. 

Phil had changed, and Clint, at least theoretically, hadn’t. It would be one thing if Clint could chalk it up to emotional bias and team bonding and a simple human crush that were no longer in effect, but the robotics brass ring that Doom had managed to grab before anyone else was a system closer to biological than mechanical. Doombots got angry when you insulted them, experienced pleasure when you did something nice for them, and suffered boredom during pointless meetings. If it was mediated by a processor or a subroutine, Clint wasn’t aware of it any more than he’d been aware of his amygdala firing up or his hypothalamus kicking in--the stimulus produced a naturally-felt response. It was an engineering miracle meant to eliminate visual or behavioral tells which might betray a double. 

Great for Dr. Doom, Clint supposed, but for him it meant that he didn’t have adrenal glands to dump hormones into his blood anymore, but he could still feel a jolt of fear when he saw a bullet with Phil’s name on it hit the chamber. 

Phil stopped and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand, not looking at Clint. “I’m sorry I said that. It was unfair and unkind.”

“Well, I’m not sorry I said that, because it’s turning into kind of a problem,” Clint told him quietly. “But, you know, apology accepted.”

“This is the job,” Phil said again, more gently this time. “Like it or not, this is what we’re doing out here. Any reinforcements we call are getting routed through three different bureaus to disguise the call’s origin. By the time someone else is online to take care of something, it’s too late.”

“We can still play it a little safer,” Clint insisted. “It’s not just your ass on the line here, Coulson. If you buy it while I’m watching your back, they’ll probably pull the plug on the whole stealing-a-supervillain’s-crap-and-repurposing-it program. Just think of all the robot doubles that’ll never get a chance to be incredibly disappointed in how their originals’ lives turned out.”

“Barton,” Phil sighed, a warning creeping into his tone. The last time Clint had caught that tone, he’d asked Ward for some privacy so he could ‘lube the old U-joint,’ and it turned out the kid wouldn’t recognize a euphemism if it pulled a knife on him, because the next thing Clint had known, Phil was having to shut down Fitz and Simmons’s eager-beaver offers to help and Skye was half-dead of secondhand embarrassment.

“I’m not hanging around to watch you die,” Clint said. “I know it might be in the cards. It always is. But generally that assumes we’re all doing our best to put it off as long as possible, all other things being equal. I know I’m not allowed to ask, but I’m pretty sure real-me would agree.”

Phil ran his fingers through his hair, his eyes going distant. “I’m not so sure about that.”

“Which one of us is the expert, here?” Clint snorted. 

Phil scoffed quietly. Neither of them, it seemed, and Clint let his lips twist into a sour smile.

Then again, it wasn’t like the real Clint had signed off on this. They couldn’t exactly sit down and exchange information. Maybe the real him had built up an immunity to seeing Phil in a t-shirt that was clinging like a second skin. Maybe the real him had gotten sick of wanting what he couldn’t have and found something else he could. Maybe the real him had developed a difference of opinion on some topic or other big enough to kill the longing. Looking at Phil in the dim light filtering through the punctured ceiling, Clint didn’t really believe it, though.

If the real Clint was here, seeing Phil as lost as he looked now, drawn and weary and tense, in need of a colleague and not just another agent to worry about, Clint was willing to bet he’d have the same impulses Clint did. 

Except, Clint thought, _he_ was never going to get the chance to act on them. He might not even get the chance to see Phil again, if they drew a bad hand on one of these missions. He might never even find out what had happened, if his clearance level never got bumped back up to the right level. The thought hit like a bullet.

Clint took a few steps toward Phil, swept him into his arms, and kissed him.

Phil stepped back warily as soon as Clint let go. “Well, that’s new.”

“It isn’t,” Clint chuckled, bitterness as good a cover as any for frustration and fear. “Pre-dates the Avengers Initiative, if you really want to know.”

“That so?” Phil asked, and it suddenly occurred to Clint that he had no real way to tell what was Phil objecting to being kissed by Clint and what was Phil objecting to being kissed by a machine and what was Phil’s new baseline state of objecting to everything in general.

“Yup.”

Phil’s eyes narrowed. “Any particular reason you’ve suddenly decided to act on something you’ve shown no evidence of for almost five years, then?”

Clint shrugged. “I don’t know. I felt like it? You’re looking particularly hot today? I didn’t want to mess up a great working relationship or make things weird or wind up stuck with a new handler, but now that real-me’s been brainfucked down to a Level 1 by an alien god and _me_ -me’s a recycled killbot with a bomb wired to my motherboard just-in-case and you officially never got tagged in the helicarrier crash and Fury was totally just lying about everything but the way you twitch every time somebody sneezes too loud or walks behind you makes me think that’s a huge lie, I feel like we’re twenty klicks past any of that.” Clint snapped his fingers and brightened. “Oh! Plus, you almost got shot back there, and then argued with me about it being a problem, and it kind of feels like you’ve got a death wish or superpowers I don’t know about or PTSD that’s resulting in compulsive and excessive risk-taking. So I figured, you know, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”

Phil leaned back against the wall and rubbed his eyes, tension draining from his frame and leaving him looking the sort of tired Clint remembered from his days on the run.

“You don’t have a kill switch,” Phil said, after a moment.

“That kind of seems like an oversight,” Clint told him. 

Not that he was in any great hurry to go to the great partition in the sky, but it seemed… he supposed the word he was looking for was _preferrable_ to racking up another hundred-odd team-kills. And while odds of what had happened with Loki were probably something like one in a trillion, Doom somehow figuring out one of his bots was missing from inventory and doing a remote factory reset was easily predictable. Clint hadn’t really explored the upper ranges of his strength, and he certainly wasn’t about to experiment with his ability to fight past structural damage, but the thought of some old Doom protocol coming back online while the Bus was in flight with no failsafe available was enough to make his blood run cold.

“Yeah, well. SHIELD misses things every so often, I don’t know what to tell you,” Phil spat.

“You wouldn’t let them,” Clint surmised. The quick flash of _something_ , there and gone too fast for Clint to identify it, told him he’d guessed right. “And now you’re regretting it. Also, you’re trying to distract me from all the other stuff I said, and doing a piss-poor job of it.”

Phil glared at him. “I regret it because it wound up meaning that you’ve got a lot shorter leash, and they periodically comb your data for impending aberrant behavior instead of just assuming I’ll hit a button if you miss a check-in or go rogue.”

“And the other stuff?” Clint asked. He couldn’t decide if he was more creeped out by the idea of the thought police scanning him periodically or comforted by the idea of not having to worry that he was going off-model, that they had a team to worry about that for him. There was definitely a long, thin streak of spite in it, though. Why should he be the only one to suffer through Clint’s fucked-up memories?

“Classified,” Phil said flatly, his face twisting into a grimace.

“Nobody here but us chickens,” Clint pointed out.

“If I told you, it would be the second time.” Phil looked down, and Clint frowned. “They’re not above deleting things you’re not supposed to know.”

“Oh.” Creeped out, Clint thought, was now very much in the lead. Then-- “Wait, you shared classified information with a Level 1?”

“No, I shared classified information with a Level 6.” Phil fixed him with a frustrated look, then shook his head. “I felt you had a right to know what you were getting into before you accepted this assignment.”

“Because I had a real choice?” Clint asked. Possibly, he could have elected to be shut down and parted out, but that wasn’t much of a choice.

“Between this and resuming normal field duties under Sitwell,” Phil reminded him.

“I assumed that was a joke.”

“Why would--”

“Because he’s a one-man weiner party!” Clint groaned. “Getting stuck with him as my handler was like, _specifically_ one of the reasons I never made a pass at you. He’s literally the worst.”

“He’s not even close to the worst,” Phil said mildly.

“Okay, he’s the worst in any department operating active strike teams,” Clint said. He could be fair, under the circumstances. “So you put all your cards on the table, just like that? You’re invulnerable and immortal and Fury lied to everyone for kicks, and now you’re going to walk the earth and collect all the garbage the invasion left behind and spread the gospel of Xenu or something?”

“Clint, please.” Phil’s voice was quiet in a way Clint had never heard before, and he froze, his heart kicking into high gear. 

It really did seem unfair, he thought distantly, that he had to put up with bullshit biological stress responses when he was a robot. Verisimilitude could suck his synthskin-and-hydraulics dick. 

“You told me once,” Clint said. Phil clearly hadn’t gotten into that much trouble over it, if he was still leading a strike team and rocking a Level 8. “Tell me again.”

“They’ll delete it again.”

“So I’ll know until then,” Clint said. He could feel a window of opportunity closing. “Come on, just--” He checked himself when he caught the look on Phil’s face. “I promise this is the last time I’ll ask.”

“A promise you won’t remember making?” Phil asked, looking up to the rafters. “Hardly--”

“So _tell me_ I promised,” he snapped. He closed the distance between them and grabbed Phil’s arms, and he could feel Phil’s biceps tense and the heat of his skin through the thin cotton of his sleeves. He could also smell Phil’s soap and track the sudden shift in Phil’s posture, and it was possible that this had not been the wisest course of action he could have taken if he wanted to stay focused. Clint swallowed. “They can’t go digging around in your brain and delete things they don’t like you knowing. You can remember a few things for both of us, can’t you?”

Phil laughed, soft and bleak, and Clint shook him a little, sharp but with no force behind it.

“Let me know for now,” he begged. “Until somebody runs scandisk or reformats something or whatever the fuck it is they do, I’ll know. Please.”

Phil took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, his eyes on Clint’s face. Finally, he nodded.

“Fury wasn’t lying when he told the Avengers that I died.”

“They revived you?” Clint asked, choking down a flutter of panic. He’d known, after a fashion. It would have been a lot to coordinate, especially during a catastrophic assault, and for what? To screw with the handful of people who’d been left on the carrier after Loki was done with it? Fury had simply called it officially while the EMTs were still working. It happened.

“Yeah,” Phil laughed, that same mirthless tone he’d had before. Clint’s gut tightened, and he was going to track down whoever’d designed whatever model doombot he was and have a word or two with them, when this was over. “After about a week.”

“Um.” Clint ran through what he knew of bleeding edge medicine and came up with nothing. “You’re not a zombie, are you?”

He wanted to take it back the moment a dull horror stole across Phil’s face, but Phil was already shrugging him off. Clint didn’t relax his grip, sensing in a way he couldn’t put into words that letting go would be the end of not only the conversation but also his chance to fix whatever it was he’d just done.

“That’s probably the most apt way of putting it,” Phil murmured.

“Well, how’d I put it before? Or how did you put it, when you explained it to me before?” Clint asked quickly. “I mean, you’re obviously _not_ a zombie, I don’t know why I said that, I--”

“You know how they treat certain types of bone cancer?” Phil asked. “Titrate out healthy cells from a donor sample, inject it into the patient, hope the cells colonize the new substrate well enough that they replace the sick and damaged ones after chemotherapy?”

“Sure.” Clint had no idea what the hell Phil was talking about, but the concept seemed sound enough.

“SHIELD found an alien organism in the hull of a derelict spaceship in a decaying orbit. It was dead, but its tissue was still trying to heal the injuries it had suffered, and the remaining organs were still functioning. If it hadn’t been decapitated in the crash, it probably would have survived. Someone had the bright idea to see what would happen if the active cells were injected into a human subject.”

“That sounds, uh, unethical as hell,” Clint said.

“Terminal patients drawn from SHIELD’s ranks,” Phil explained. “A few field operatives who signed waivers in the event of their deaths.”

“So it went great, and it’s top secret because aliens that aren’t from Asgard or wherever the fuck Chitaur is are also real, and it only gets doled out on special occasions because there’s not a lot to go around?” Clint wanted it to be true, wanted to be correct in this, and was willing to trade it for there really being a bomb in his chest if any god out there was listening and interested.

“It was a nightmare, and I personally ordered the termination of the program three years ago.”

“Awkward.” It slipped out before Clint remembered that this wasn’t, necessarily, the sort of revelation that required a response.

Phil blinked at him, mouth pursing and then going slack, and then he started laughing. Genuine, honest laughter, the sort of laughter Clint realized he hadn’t heard out of Phil since he’d come online. Clint pulled him into a gentle hug, and Phil let him.

“What happens now?” Clint asked, after Phil subsided. “I mean, did it give you weird powers? Do you actually not have to worry about getting shot anymore, and I’ve been freaking out over nothing the past three months? Are you functionally immortal, so long as you don’t get your head blown off or something?”

“What happens now is I wait for signs of an impending psychotic break followed by rapid physical deterioration and death,” Phil said.

“Well, that sounds kind of bullshit.” Clint couldn’t bring himself to let go. _It was a nightmare._ “That’s not a guarantee, is it?”

Fury wouldn’t have used it if it was a guarantee, would he? Or if he had, Phil would be confined to the Hive, finishing up whatever was so massively important that Phil had to be dragged back into life to see to it personally before slipping away again.

Phil sighed against him, and Clint felt him pull back. He grudgingly relaxed his hold, and Phil stepped away.

“There was a hundred percent failure rate, in the trials,” Phil told him. “But there were only six people involved, for obvious reasons, so the sample size was miniscule. I’m also the first and so far only person to receive an infusion as a corpse, which may or may not affect the outcome.” Phil hesitated, then flexed his hands. “Physically, I feel better than I have in a decade. I seem to be healing faster, shaking off things that would have put me down before. It’s… well, anecdotal, I guess. Medical hasn’t admitted to anything outside of normal human parameters.”

“You think they’d lie about it?” Clint asked.

“Yes.” The answer was immediate, jarring, and confident, and Clint grimaced.

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything,” Phil said. “Loki--”

“I meant more in a my-condolences kind of way,” Clint corrected, wincing. 

Of course Phil had automatically thought Clint was issuing a long-overdue apology for getting him killed in the first place. It was weird, looking at everything that had gone down and feeling like it had happened to someone else. In Clint’s head, he’d been screwing around in Caracas, come home to a request to screw around at the R&D facility that officially did not exist, and woken up a year and a half in the future where a jackass who looked and talked a lot like him had almost gotten the entire planet conquered and was now grounded until further notice. Of course _he_ didn’t have anything to apologize for. He hadn’t been conscious since 2010.

Phil snorted softly. “Sorry. Conditioned response. I spent a lot of time trying to convince, uh, real-you that it wasn’t his fault.”

It was reassuring, the way Phil always seemed to trip over that terminology--that demarcation between ‘robot’ and ‘real’--even though it was Clint himself who’d come up with it. He supposed he’d been acting out with it, needling everyone with the fact that he was a robot, hoping to make it bother them as much as it bothered him. Phil didn’t seem to much like categorizing him as not-real.

“For what it’s worth, you don’t seem like you’re going to snap and murder us all in our sleep or anything,” Clint told him.

“Thanks,” Phil said drily. “And thank you, for sympathizing. I know things haven’t exactly been simple for you either. I know you didn’t ask for this.”

“Could be worse, I guess.” Clint smirked. “I at least got to kiss you the once.”

Phil rubbed his face and deflated, and Clint tried not to show how much it stung.

“Clint, I…” Phil spread his hands. “I like you. I do. You’re handsome, you’re funny, you’re kind whenever you can afford to be. You’re smart, you’re damned good with your hands, and you’re one of the best agents I’ve had the pleasure of working with in what’s proven to be a lot longer career than I thought I’d have.”

“I feel like the ‘but’ coming up is big enough to sink the Titanic,” Clint muttered.

“I’m your CO,” Phil said flatly. “And even beyond that--which has, incidentally, been more than enough for as long as we’ve known each other--you’re officially classed as materiel instead of personnel. There’s no way this plays out without coercion being an insurmountable concern.”

Clint bit his lip. It wasn’t that Phil was wrong. He wasn’t. It was just that the entire condition of being materiel instead of personnel--of being a fucking _replica_ of a real person who was still out there living his own life--meant that his list of goals had shrunk considerably. 

He wasn’t packing up and going back to the farm to see Laura and her kids. He wasn’t taking Nat out dancing in some tourist town, drinking syrupy frozen cocktails with dumb names until he couldn’t think straight, waking up stupid-hungover but satisfied in her arms in an anonymous hotel on the beach the next morning. He wasn’t going to retire from SHIELD and become a carpenter or learn to play the guitar or buy a houseboat and drift up and down the coast with the seasons. He was never going to settle down, get married, have kids of his own, spend summers scolding his kids not to pester his nieces and nephews and his nieces and nephews to play with his kids in some bullshit bucolic fantasyland. 

Real-him was--probably--never going to do any of it, either, but it was on the table. It was a possibility for him, if he got his fucking act together. Here and now and a robot, Clint was face to face with a list of achievable goals that fit on one hand. He didn’t have much left, and he’d be damned if he let any of it go without a fight.

“See, I was thinking that if I have to run around doing all this,” Clint gestured at the trashed hangar, “without getting paid and with full knowledge that I’m walking home the second some asshole in accounting figures out it’s cheaper to run off another copy than to pay for my plane ticket, the smallest bone life can possibly throw me is getting to take you on a date every so often.” He shook his head. “I mean, it seems unfair that being metaphorically screwed takes getting literally screwed off the table.”

“Clint--”

Clint held up a hand, and Phil fell silent, waiting for him to continue.

“Do you trust me?” he asked, trying to shove as much of the unvoiced frustration and anger he’d been swallowing for the past three months as he could into the question.

“Yes.” Phil said it with that same bone-deep conviction as he’d had before, when he’d told Clint that medical would lie to him. Clint didn’t know what the hell that said about their situation, but he knew it wasn’t good.

“Can you trust yourself to listen if I say no or that I’m uncomfortable with something?” he asked. “When you say psychotic break, are we talking violence, paranoia, aggression issues?”

“Obvious hallucinations, aphasia, self-mutilation, repetitive behavior, catatonia…” Phil ticked them off an obvious mental checklist. “That we know of. Like I said, I’m the first full revival. So, right now? Yes, I can trust myself to listen to you. But I have no idea if that’ll hold true six months from now.”

“Well, odds are we’ll have been deathrayed into oblivion by then courtesy of some kid who built a backyard gamma reactor to see if they could, so. Like I said, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”

He caught the way Phil’s jaw clenched and his shoulders tightened, and he scoffed.

“This isn’t me being flip, Phil,” he said. “There isn’t a playbook for any of this, and half the crew’s raw as hell, and we can’t even call in backup ninety percent of the time. This is more down to luck than skill, and it’s not going to last forever. We’re on borrowed time no matter what.” He took Phil’s hands in his own, and raised them to his lips. “If I can trust you to listen to me, you can trust me to tell you what I want. And what I want, right now, is to at least _try_.”

Phil closed his eyes and nodded. “Okay.”

When Clint leaned into him this time, when Clint pressed his lips against Phil’s this time, Phil kissed him back, gently but earnestly.


	2. Chapter 2

“How did I take it, the first time you told me?” Clint asked, flopping down on the couch in Phil’s cramped office. It doubled as a spare bunk when they were carrying extra bodies, so it wasn’t as uncomfortable as it could have been. The Bus had been designed charitably, for an ops base, with an eye on the team that was working out of it essentially living out of it as well, but it was still an exercise in function over form. Clint had found himself napping on the couch more often than he’d slept in his assigned bunk over the past few months.

He dug his tablet out of the storage pocket and started on the preliminary misrep for the base Phil had blown half to hell. They’d babysat it long enough for a local team to be dispatched for a full lockdown and mop-up, but no one on the ground had had clearance to talk to them, let alone accept a report. Fury would no doubt be expecting their reports sooner rather than later, and Clint wasn’t in a hurry to give the keep-or-toss crew in charge of his brain any extra reasons to hate him. 

“Um.” Phil made a face, and Clint pretended to be too absorbed in the report to notice. “I don’t really know. You said ‘Bitchin’.’ and then started exploring the Bus. I expect there was more to your reaction than that, but since I told you twenty-four hours after you were first booted up and twelve hours after confirming that both aliens and magic were real and thirty minutes after you realized Dr. Doom was basically, as you put it, flashing you every time you took a leak, I don’t know how many emotional resources you really had to throw at processing it.”

Clint remembered the first few days as a blur, but now he wondered how much of that was the sheer shock and breadth of everything that had been dropped on him and how much was his brain trying to make sense of corrupted data.

“Did you tell me the part about possibly going crazy and dying, or just the part about being shot up with an indestructible alien smoothie?” Clint asked.

Phil gave him an unamused look.

“I’d be sorrier, but you did just remind me that I’m running around with a psychotic Latvarian autocrat’s dick in my pants.” He understood why they hadn’t bothered fixing it--they hadn’t been sure they could alter it and get a functional product, which he did appreciate as a concern, and it had been a tactically negligible feature compared to things like his face and stature. That didn’t make it any less weird, though.

“I don’t think I got to the part about going crazy and dying,” Phil said stiffly.

“How’d you take the bit about me still having Doom’s package?” Clint asked.

“I was slightly more disturbed than I really had a right to be,” Phil admitted.

May knocked softly on the door and poked her head in, eyes focusing on Phil. “Ward’s about five minutes away from giving Fitz and Simmons permission to inject him with nanites if it gets him out of bed faster.”

Phil rubbed his eyes. “Where’d they get nanites from?”

She spread her hands and shook her head, and Phil sighed.

“At least it’s not Pym particles?” she offered.

“Tell him he’ll be on desk duty until we can be sure an EMP won’t knock him on his ass if he lets them introduce nanites into his system,” Phil said. He caught her look and frowned. “You didn’t seriously think I’d be on board with this, did you?”

She shrugged. “I’m glad you’re not?”

Phil watched her go with a bemused expression, then glanced at Clint, his cheeks coloring when he saw Clint’s smirk.

“Compulsive risk-taking,” Clint said mildly. “Granted, it’s going around these days, but…”

“I feel like you should be somewhat less equanimous about this,” Phil grumbled.

Clint stretched, slowly and to great effect, and then settled back into place, a self-satisfied smile on his face at the way he suddenly had Phil’s complete and undivided attention.

“I feel like you should slap a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door and come here,” Clint said, running his fingertips over his fly.

Phil licked his lips. “I feel like Fury might literally castrate me if he found out I left this much Chitauri tech sitting in a branch HQ with no one the wiser so I could make out with you.” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t suppose this offer will still be on the table in fifteen minutes?”

“Fifteen--” Clint rolled his eyes. “I’ve never seen you finish a report in under an hour. Ever.”

“There’s a reason bulletpoints exist, Barton,” Phil snorted, giving him a sly look. Clint watched in morbid fascination as Phil blew through a report in record time, never typing more than a half-dozen words before hitting enter, his fingers flying over the keyboard. He submitted it with a flourish and snapped the laptop closed, the edge of his mouth tugging up in a smile.

“What’s the phrase kids these days are using? Scared _and_ horny?” Clint asked, grinning.

Phil locked the door and sank to his knees next to the couch, and Clint didn’t bother playing it cool when Phil’s fingers traced the stripe of skin bared when he’d stretched. He grabbed the front of Phil’s shirt and pulled him down firmly, meeting him halfway in a scorching kiss. Clint groaned when Phil’s hand curled around the edge of his waist, pulling him closer to Phil, and he shoved his tongue into Phil’s mouth. Phil met him measure for measure, until Clint broke away to pull his shirt over his head. Phil’s hungry gaze raked over his chest, his shoulders, his stomach, coming to rest on the half-undone fly. Clint laced his fingers together, sliding them under his head and raising his eyebrows smugly, as if he wasn’t already at half-mast just from kissing Phil for thirty seconds, as if he had any idea what he’d do if Phil turned him down.

Phil shook his head. “You’re lucky confidence is sexy. Come on, scooch up. If I throw my back out giving you a blowjob, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Clint’s smile broadened, and he pushed himself farther up the couch to make room for Phil, who peremptorily knocked Clint’s leg off the couch so that he could sit between Clint’s knees. He pulled Clint’s fly down the rest of the way and eased Clint’s boxers down until his cock bobbed free.

“God, you’re gorgeous,” Phil breathed, close enough that Clint could feel his breath ghosting over his skin, and Clint smirked to camouflage the way his heart was thumping in his chest and his stomach had tightened and some errant subroutine was stuck in a loop of _please, please, please_ in the back of his mind. It was laughable, the way Phil’s hands on him felt like lining up a shot with the world riding on it. Like Phil was going to stop now, think better of it, leave him with a hard-on and a report to write to go do something else.

Then Phil’s lips closed over his glans, tentative and gentle and slow, and Clint moaned and arched into it. Phil relaxed his jaw, let Clint thrust up into his mouth, his tongue tracing the contours of Clint’s cock, circling his head, running over the edge of his foreskin. He followed Clint back down when he relaxed, collapsing back into the dubious comfort of the couch, hands braced on Clint’s thighs.

Clint reached down and grabbed Phil’s wrists, repositioning his hands so they were wrapped around Clint’s hips instead. The pads of Phil’s thumbs traced slow circles over his hip bones to match the lazy pace with which he was sucking Clint’s cock, and Clint felt a keen spike of bitterness, bone-deep anger that they’d never get a whole afternoon in Phil’s DC apartment to just fuck and nap and order in, never get a weekend vacation to explore a tourist trap with nothing hanging in the balance but how sober they wanted to be at any given time, never get so much as an actual bed, never get more than a quickie here and there around the teenagers they were trying to keep alive and May’s grudging tolerance of the entire situation. That Phil could ignore the likelihood of interruption, tease him a little, make him ache all the way up his spine with a need to come before Phil had to answer the door, defuse some emergency--

Phil sucked Clint’s entire length into his mouth, letting Clint nudge down his throat, and Clint hissed, his fingers stroking through Phil’s hair until he found the back of Phil’s head. It was difficult not to hold on, guide him, difficult to let Phil pull back off and go back to teasing him.

Clint felt like he was going to melt down, or short a circuit, after bare minutes of it, and he dragged Phil up for a kiss. He didn’t recognize his own voice when he pushed Phil back, looked into his eyes, and said, “I can’t take much more of this, Coulson.”

It was Phil’s turn to smirk, to acknowledge that Clint was hardly going to pull his pants up, take a cold shower, go back to doing paperwork instead of letting Phil blow him for as long as they could manage without an interruption. But when he crawled back down Clint’s body, Phil went to work in earnest, licking along his shaft with that hot, wet mouth of his, sucking him down, flicking the tip of his tongue along Clint’s slit, pulling away only to mouth at Clint’s balls for a brief, blinding few moments. Clint whimpered when Phil properly deepthroated him, and his grip on Phil’s hair tightened. He came infinitely harder than he had any of the times he’d fantasized about this, alone in his bunk, jerking off and imagining Phil’s mouth on him, and when he came back to himself, Phil was watching him, affection and amusement coloring his expression in equal measure.

“If I yelled something in binary, I don’t wanna know,” Clint muttered, tugging his boxers up.

“That might have been preferable to ‘mother of infield fly rule,’” Phil chuckled hoarsely, and Clint shivered at the rasp in his voice.

“You know, if anyone’s to blame for me being completely incoherent five seconds ago, it’d be you,” Clint said, pushing himself into a sitting position. He leaned forward, guiding Phil back, kissing his way down Phil’s neck and chest as he went. Phil let him, let him shove cotton knit up and out of the way, let him kiss his way down the faint dusting of hair that began at Phil’s navel and continued past the obstacle presented by his slacks.

Phil’s breath hitched when Clint undid the button, tugged the zipper down, lifted Phil’s hips with ease, jerked his pants down while he was at it. Clint wedged his thighs under Phil’s, leaned over him, kissed him hard. Phil’s eyes were dark with want, his breathing deep and wanting, his pulse hard against the skin when Clint’s fingers wrapped around the nape of his neck, thumb resting softly against the side of his throat. If he’d thought to ask, thought to locate a suitable lube, Phil would probably have let him fuck him, let him bury his cock in Phil’s ass up to the hilt, an idea that left Clint dizzy with the possibility.

He reached between them, wrapped his hand around Phil’s cock, and stroked him, firm and slow and careful, and Phil closed his eyes and clung to him. It wasn’t long before he had Phil bucking against him, desperate and moaning into Clint’s throat, and Clint had to wrap his arm around Phil’s waist instead to keep his grip.

Clint never wanted it to end, never wanted Phil to stop gasping his name, never wanted Phil’s fingers to tighten against his back that final time before loosening, Phil’s body going pliant and soft in his arms. Phil shuddered against him, sweat slicking his skin and his gaze unfocused, and Clint couldn’t help sucking a bruise into his shoulder, far enough down that it was easily hidden under a shirt but still there, a mottled purple reminder that Clint had held him close, made him come. That it had been fine, that nothing terrible had happened, that it had been as good as either of them could have hoped for. That Clint would happily do it again, and more besides.

“Not too bad for a first time, huh?” Clint asked, brushing his lips over Phil’s hairline. Phil chuckled softly, his eyes drooping closed and his face relaxed, and Clint basked in it. The lights flickered for the briefest of moments, and Phil stared at the ceiling in disbelief.

“I’m going to kill them,” he sighed.

“You could just not intervene and let whatever they’re doing kill them,” Clint pointed out, levering himself up regretfully. He found his shirt and pulled it back on, then smoothed down his hair.

“That stands a good chance of killing everybody else, too,” Phil said, doing what he could to make himself presentable. He took a long pull from his water bottle.

“Mint?” Clint offered.

“Thank you.” Phil pinched the bridge of his nose as the lights flickered again. “Let’s just infect a coworker with nanites, what could possibly go wrong. They’re grounded. All four of them.”

“Go get ‘em, tiger,” Clint said, trying to keep a straight face. 

Phil looked at him, the picture of wounded dignity, and then shook his head. He leaned down and kissed Clint, slow and tender, before breaking away and heading for the door. “You want to have dinner together, later, if we can swing it?”

“It’s a date,” Clint agreed, grinning. Phil smiled back at him, then got his game face on and strode out the door.

Clint could hear a barked “ _What_ are you people doing to _my plane_?” from the hall, and he settled back on the couch to bask what passed for an afterglow with doombots. Maybe there were a few silver linings to the cloud, after all.


End file.
